Biden Opens Wide Critique Of Bush Plan For a Shield

By JANE PERLEZ

Published: September 11, 2001

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10—
Declaring a profound difference with President Bush, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., said today that plans for missile defense sacrifice national security for the sake of a ''theological'' belief -- and that the effort to make such a system work would cost astronomical amounts of money.

Mr. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave a toughly worded speech intended as an opening salvo in a campaign to slow dramatically the plans to test -- and perhaps put in place -- a limited national missile defense system. Mr. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, said the administration would create greater insecurity than at any time since the 1960's if it went ahead.

The system would undo arms control efforts of the last 40 years and set the United States against its allies -- and it would not offer the protection that its proponents promise, he said.

Mr. Biden has fastened onto missile defense as the centerpiece of his critique of Bush foreign policy. In part, that is because the system is almost the sole focus of the administration's foreign policy, but it is also because plans for the system run against the senator's strong support for arms control.

''Are we willing to end four decades of arms control agreements, and go it alone, a kind of bully nation, sometimes a little wrongheaded, but ready to make unilateral decisions in what we perceive to be our self-interest?'' Mr. Biden said in his speech at the National Press Club.

Plunging forward with the system would mean saying ''the hell with our treaties, our commitments, our word,'' he said.

In his role as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, a job he assumed in May after Democrats won control of the Senate, Mr. Biden is now in a much stronger position to try to curb the proposed missile defense system. In an interview after his speech, the senator said he hoped to build an alliance in Congress to thwart the administration's plans.

The alliance would hinge on budget hawks who are skeptical of the system's costs and foreign policy experts who worry about what Mr. Biden called the ''pell-mell rush'' toward the system.

In his assault on national missile defense, Mr. Biden used several major arguments. First, he said, the administration had no idea whether the science and technology was available to build the system that it envisaged. Second, in the face of a difficult budget fight and a deteriorating economy, the country could not afford the cost.

Mr. Biden said he was heartened by the $135 million cut in the budget for missile defense by the House Armed Services Committee last month.

He said the cheapest system proposed by the Bush administration -- similar to one suggested by President Bill Clinton -- would cost $60 billion over 20 years, but could rise to as much as $120 billion.

A more complicated system that would combat decoys or munitions that carry biological weapons -- known as layered defense -- would cost between one-quarter trillion and half a trillion dollars, Mr. Biden said.

Even for that amount, he contended, the system might work ''only nine out of ten times -- assuming the administration knew how to build it.''

Mr. Biden has many times stated his opposition to the unilateral withdrawal by the United States from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids building a defensive shield.

The senator has said he favors more research on missile defenses and would be in favor of negotiating with the Russians for an amendment to the ABM treaty.

The administration had also said that it would prefer to reach an accord with the Russians on altering the treaty, but it insists that if it failed to come to an agreement it would unilaterally pull out of the pact.

Mr. Biden said the administration would be wiser to open a dialogue with North Korea that would bring about a ''verifiable agreement'' to end development, positioning and export of long range missiles by that government.

And he said the administration would be better off upgrading the Air Force for ''real needs.'' ''We could replace aging F-16's, A-10's and F-14's with the Joint Strike Fighter for $233 billion,'' he said.

Photo: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the National Press Club yesterday. (Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)